Bart Wauters and Marco de Benito, The History of Law in Europe: An Introduction and Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D Dubber, and Mark Godfrey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History

Author
DOI10.3366/elr.2019.0587
Published date01 September 2019
Date01 September 2019
Pages454-456

How, it may be wondered, do an Introduction to and a Handbook of a subject compare with one another? Are these alternative names for the same kind of book, or should we expect an introduction and a handbook to do different things? To start with the obvious point, we may of course expect an introduction to lead readers into territory with which they are unfamiliar, identifying major landmarks, tracing routes between them, and adding as much topographical detail as may serve to bring the subject to life without rendering it incomprehensible. In their new introduction to European legal history, Bart Wauters and Marco de Benito have provided an excellent example of the genre. Difficult as it may be for some of us to remember what it was like to be the cupidae legum iuventutes to whom the authors dedicate their book, it does appear to be the sort of genuinely introductory survey that may be recommended to students without hesitation. In under 200 pages the authors cover all the ground most teachers of the subject would consider essential, delineating the broad contours of legal development in Europe from antiquity to modernity, and finding space for a surprising amount of specific information, all of which has been skilfully selected to illuminate the broad themes outlined. The authors are professors at a Spanish university whose lucid prose should put some native speakers of English to shame.

The ability of many continental historians to write in flawless English is also evident in the Oxford Handbook of European Legal History. But in what sense is it a handbook? A thousand pages longer than the introduction by Wauters and de Benito, it is certainly not a “handy” volume in any literal sense of the term. If it is instead designed to be the type of book that students of legal history may wish to have “at hand” as they work, it is a particular variant of that type of book. It does not consist of reliable handlists of dates, writers, publications and so on, which might have secured it a permanent position on many desks. Rather, it consists of essays on European legal history, many by leading experts in the field, and not simply essays on favoured topics but carefully coordinated surveys of branches of research. It is aptly called a handbook of European legal history because it is meant to provide a compendious review of the discipline as it stands, looking backwards to see where it has come from, and forwards to see where it may be going. Some essays outline the...

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